> But Swift Playgrounds 4 isn’t the big announcement the developer community was waiting for. It has significant limits and lacks several advanced tools — debug

> But Swift Playgrounds 4 isn’t the big announcement the developer community was waiting for. It has significant limits and lacks several advanced tools — debugging and profiling tools, versioning, storyboard integration, support for third-party packages, etc. “Swift Playgrounds is great for experimenting and debugging code, but it is missing many of the features ... required to make fuller-fledged apps,” Haas explains. He says the program is “perfect for developing small utility applications, such as a to-do list, but currently incapable of building the next Angry Birds.” I worry that Apple is going down the Microsoft hole of trying to build one IDE that does everything you might possibly need to utilize the platform. Visual Studio has been hellishly complicated for years because there was no thought towards third party integrations or extensions that may have improved the environment. And, yeah, Xcode is definitely Darwin's version of Visual Studio. But at least on macOS you have the bash escape hatch. You can install CocoaPods. You can install the Xcode CLI tools and not touch the application at all (like how the Flutter / React Native extensions for VS Code do it). You could install Ionic or Xamarin's tools and build apps that way. When we asked for "Xcode on iPad," we didn't just mean building a mobile version of Xcode. Xcode on iPad meant support for developer tools like compilers, bundlers, interpreters, bash scripts, etc. > But the most significant thing about Swift Playgrounds 4, to the developers I spoke to, is what it indicates about Apple’s vision for the future of the iPad. To many, it is a hint that coding on iPads is a priority for Apple — and that “Xcode on iPad,” and perhaps a user interface that better complements it, might be on the way. Maybe it is a hint for the future: Apple loves dipping their toes into things over multiple years. Shortcuts, for example, started out missing a ton of critical functionality that has been patched in in subsequent iOS updates, and it is slowly becoming useful in more situations. I'm okay with Swift Playgrounds becoming more powerful so long as we have the escape hatch we have on Mac (which we don't). I'm worried that maybe the future is darker though; I'm worried Apple will reject all third party developer tools and only Xcode will have this capability of compiling and previewing apps. In that case, iPad development will never take off, even though it deserves to. The answer to all of this is sideloading. But as they continue to remain hostile to that idea, I don't understand what their plan is to target the pro demographic of developers, who onboard new tools every month and have a very specific and unique workflow to get their job done.